Once Rachael had said that it bothered her too. She said, “I don’t want to know all about that stuff. Especially not her private life. She’s supposed to be our mother, for goodness’ sake!”

We all knew about the “questions” Mom wanted us to ask. Mom had always talked a lot about how precious a gift God had given us in our bodies and how beautiful marriage was and all about the Christmas morning thing, how we were to save our bodies like presents, to share them only with the person of the Lord’s choosing for us. How we were going to spend our lives with this special person God had ordained us to marry before the foundation of the world.

Mom had explained years ago how babies got to be born, how the male sperm swims by marvelous instinct up a little passage into the womb and meets the woman’s seed and fertilizes it and how it grows and becomes a precious baby with its own fingerprints. She had drawn the diagram of the ovaries, like two balloons on strings, and had explained to me how in God’s great plan once a month a precious little egg came down to be flushed out, and that was why Janet was in a bad mood and had almost broken my arm twisting it when I had only been teasing her, holding her bag of monthly pads over her head and shouting, “Tell me where you put these!”

Mom’s talks had gotten a lot longer lately. I knew all I wanted to know a long time ago. When Mom started asking if I had any questions, it meant she wanted to discuss These Things some more and even tell me about how it felt and how I would feel when I put my seeds into my wife. Even stuff about her and Dad! Which is what got Rachael so mad she even told me about how she thought Mom was going nuts. Not nuts like you say, “He’s nuts,” but nuts as in really unhinged—the way Uncle Oswald got when he tried to kill Aunt Penelope because he said she was a vulture pecking up all his birdseed.

So I said, “No, Mom, I don’t have any questions.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed and as she did, her hair brushed the single light bulb that lit my room, and it began to swing back and forth a little, making Mom’s shadow loom up behind her and her face look like she was smiling then frowning not because she was, but just because of how the light bulb moved over her swinging on its long cord hanging from the ceiling.